Conclusion & First Impressions

The new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips are designs that we’ve been waiting for over a year now, ever since Apple had announced the M1 and M1-powered devices. The M1 was a very straightforward jump from a mobile platform to a laptop/desktop platform, but it was undeniably a chip that was oriented towards much lower power devices, with thermal limits. The M1 impressed in single-threaded performance, but still clearly lagged behind the competition in overall performance.

The M1 Pro and M1 Max change the narrative completely – these designs feel like truly SoCs that have been made with power users in mind, with Apple increasing the performance metrics in all vectors. We expected large performance jumps, but we didn’t expect the some of the monstrous increases that the new chips are able to achieve.

On the CPU side, doubling up on the performance cores is an evident way to increase performance – the competition also does so with some of their designs. How Apple does it differently, is that it not only scaled the CPU cores, but everything surrounding them. It’s not just 4 additional performance cores, it’s a whole new performance cluster with its own L2. On the memory side, Apple has scaled its memory subsystem to never before seen dimensions, and this allows the M1 Pro & Max to achieve performance figures that simply weren’t even considered possible in a laptop chip. The chips here aren’t only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you’d have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max – it’s just generally absurd.

On the GPU side of things, Apple’s gains are also straightforward. The M1 Pro is essentially 2x the M1, and the M1 Max is 4x the M1 in terms of performance. Games are still in a very weird place for macOS and the ecosystem, maybe it’s a chicken-and-egg situation, maybe gaming is still something of a niche that will take a long time to see make use of the performance the new chips are able to provide in terms of GPU. What’s clearer, is that the new GPU does allow immense leaps in performance for content creation and productivity workloads which rely on GPU acceleration.

To further improve content creation, the new media engine is a key feature of the chip. Particularly video editors working with ProRes or ProRes RAW, will see a many-fold improvement in their workflow as the new chips can handle the formats like a breeze – this along is likely going to have many users of that professional background quickly adopt the new MacBook Pro’s.

For others, it seems that Apple knows the typical MacBook Pro power users, and has designed the silicon around the use-cases in which Macs do shine. The combination of raw performance, unique acceleration, as well as sheer power efficiency, is something that you just cannot find in any other platform right now, likely making the new MacBook Pro’s not just the best laptops, but outright the very best devices for the task.

GPU Performance: 2-4x For Productivity, Mixed Gaming
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  • mjptango - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link

    What I would like to see is a sustained benchmark comparison.

    What I mean is to run a CPU or GPU intensive test over an extended period of time to see the thermal throttling effect.
    Clearly with a more power efficient SOC, the M1 family should demonstrate considerable advantage over other mobile impmentations.
    My Intel Mac heats up once the GPU kicks in and I would be sure that if an RTX-3080 is exercised long enough its performance will drop much sooner than an M1 system.
    So it would be very valuable to know these numbers because when we work, we don't just work for minute or so, but process files over the course of an hour
  • Whiteknight2020 - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link

    On a screen the size of a magazine, with a keyboard 3 inches away from it. Ergonomic not. This obsession with laptops with tiny displays and ergonomics which cause long term physical harm is just getting silly.
  • OreoCookie - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link

    My first computer (an Amiga 500) had a 14" CRT and a 12~13" usable screen area. My iPad Pro has more screen space than that. Ditto for my first PC. Only in the late 1990s did I get a used 19" trinitron CRT that had about 18" usable space. That isn't so different from my 16" MacBook Pro in terms of size, although the latter has much more screen estate in practice. It covers my field of view without having to swivel my head. Laptops are fine.

    Don't get me wrong, I still like external monitors, but laptops these days are great to get work done.
  • Whiteknight2020 - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link

    Specifically US developers, the rest of the world, not so much. And with no x86 virtualization layer the new M1 Mac's are even less enticing, can't run a full VMware/K8s stack so you need two machines.
  • Focher - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link

    Funny how for the last year, developers have been going bonkers about their M1 MacBooks being superior to equivalent x86 hardware.
  • razer555 - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link

    The GPU performance for gaming is very disappointing. Rosetta 2 translate only CPU and it doesn't affect the GPU performance. Apple said 32 cores is quite equal to mobile RTX 3080 and yet, it performs less than mobile RTX 3060. I dont think the optimization is a problem. The raw performance lacks the gaming performance so far.
  • Focher - Wednesday, October 27, 2021 - link

    It's almost like Apple has never cared about gaming on the Mac and engineered the hardware for entirely different purposes - which it totally excels at.
  • Vitor - Thursday, October 28, 2021 - link

    It is not disappointing since it hasnt been even tried. You can say emulating x86 games is disappointing. But a game fully optimized for this system would be able to get 1440p 100fps no problem I bet.
  • Lock12 - Thursday, October 28, 2021 - link

    Why didn't the table show the power consumption in the game Shadow ofthe Tomb Raider?
  • aparangement - Thursday, October 28, 2021 - link

    Hi Andrei, thanks a lot for the review.
    About the memory bandwidth, I am wondering if the numbers are comparable with those in the STREAM-Triad benchmark, like we see in the epyc 7003 review?
    e.g. https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16529/STREAM_tri...

    If so that's very impressive, M1 max actually outperforms the a 2-way x86 workstation.

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